Sunday, October 10, 2010

A17

Many mention pet things from the novel that Stanley Kubrick left out of the movie but one of the most enigmatic sections seems to have been left out and no one ever mentions, or misses it at all. The wasps were a huge part of the novel. They embodied the invisible spirits that were haunting Stephen King’s Overlook. I couldn't imagine Stanley Kubrick leaving them out but I looked high and low and couldn't find a single wasp flying around this movie. Nothing even remotely alludes to them. Then it came to me. The July 4, 1921 picture is not real yet the people in it still represent something interesting. They’re the wasps from the novel. He didn't leave them out. If you look at the picture closely every single one of people at the party are W.A.S.P.’s, and this explanation, as dull and lackluster as it is, is the only one that can claim Stephen King's source novel as a source. W.A.S.P.’s.

You don’t think I’m right, do you? Maybe we need to look at what the boss said about the people in the photo; “... they were in a photograph taken in 1921... I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph... I think the result looked perfect. Every face around Jack is an [archetype] of the period.” Do you really believe this statement, “it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph”? (1976 Oscar, Best Costume Design - Barry Lyndon) But an archetype? This is what stands out. What an interesting word he chose to describe the people in the photo. I thought I knew what archetype meant but to my good fortune I looked it up in the dictionary anyway. An archetype is “an original model of a person, an ideal example or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all.” But there’s something else; in psychology, an archetype is “a model of a person, personality, or behavior.” Psychoanalysis - “in Jungian psychology - a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.” In the photo Jack is the mold that these people spring from. He sold his soul to the devil at precisly 66 minutes and 6 seconds into the film.

In the movie Jack's evil imaginary friend Lloyd is the devil.And he gives him his first drink we hear Jack gulp it down at exactly 66 minutes and 6 seconds after the Warner Brothers logo is finished at :11 seconds into the movie. “God, I'd give anything for a drink. My God dam soul.” This is the spot where Lloyd shows up and the devil enters him.

They’re all devils, exactly like Jack. Exactly like nature’s lowly carbon copy wasp. Stanley Kubrick’s archetype of every other W.A.S.P. They’re all devils in the photo with Jack!